shaping your own identity (thoughts on the feminine mystique, part 1 of 3) -- published ~february 2012

a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication dates unknown

thoughts on the feminine mystique: part 1 of 3

I’ve just finished reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. A friend of mine joked that, after reading the book, I would emerge an empowered female. But I feel rather that I have emerged a more liberated human being.

The book was worth reading partly only because it reveals just how bad it was for many American women in the 1950’s. The quotes from major American magazines, newspapers, intellectuals, and politicians of the time read like satire today. But it wasn’t a joke back then. For many housewives during that decade, a sense of pointlessness in life fueled growing alcoholism, drug addiction, obesity, and finally suicide in America’s sprawling and expanding suburbs.

It’s not that being a housewife or a stay-at-home dad for a while is inherently bad for a person, or that it inevitably leads a woman to poison herself to death. It’s just that almost all of these women were conforming to an identity that society was forcing upon them, rather than finding and shaping their own identities. They were told that their lives served no purpose other than childrearing and husband-supporting. And so once the kids had grown up, and the husband was at work all day, and they were just sitting at home during the afternoon or playing bridge with the other women in the area, what reason was there for them to live any longer?

They wouldn’t know the answer to that question, because the answer to that question is different for every individual person, and these women had not been allowed to shape their own meaning, to discover their own interests, to find something that could give them meaning as human beings rather than just as women fulfilling a biological imperative.

In fact, most women were discouraged in school, at home, and by social science in general from even thinking about pursuing careers outside the family. Astronomy, biology, business, medicine, government, and working as a flight attendant were for men, not women. “Career women” who sought life-long involvement in these and other fields were demonized and blamed for virtually every problem in society.

This view received the backing of the intellectual establishment. Psychologists influenced by Freud believed that “career women” were suffering from “penis envy.” Ever since she saw her brother’s penis as a young girl, she knew she was missing something; by pursuing a career outside the home, she was trying to become a man, or attempting to grow a penis. And many educators in colleges and high schools felt guilty for educating women; studies had found that more educated women were less able to achieve orgasm (the reverse was later shown to be the case), and some professors suggested that by educating women as if they could become astronomers, they were preparing women for disappointment with their inevitable lot as housewives. If you treat a woman like a man (that is, like a manager or a writer or an editor or a biologist) in school, you are doing her a disservice, because she is a woman and can never be these things. Better, it was thought, that women take cooking and homemaking classes so they could be ready for their real purpose in life, rather than be disappointed and anxious about it once the children were born. Finally, in the academic world of sociology, the influential Functionalists believed the family’s integrity would be threatened if that key component – the full-time housewife with no interests outside the house – abandoned her institutional role as the full-time caregiver and babysitter of son, daughter, husband.

Countless women conformed to the image that society threw at them. 60% of women attending universities dropped out to get married young, before they had any time to develop their own interests and career-pursuits as college students. Many of those that stayed on as students were, in their own words, only there to find husbands, and they took the courses offered to prepare them for their lives as housewives. Some all-female colleges even required sophomores to take Functionalist-inspired courses on the importance of full-time housewives in society. So while men struggled in college with the stress inevitably involved whenever a human being begins to grow, to become independent, to find a meaning for his life and a career he can enjoy, women were spared these growing pains.

And conforming to the housewife role seemed an easy way out for many women – they didn’t need to study, didn’t need to work, didn’t need to develop their intellectual capacities and creativity, didn’t have to go through the pain of growing up. They could spend the bulk of their days doing household chores suited to a fifteen-year-old, rather than working hard and challenging themselves to solve the big problems of politics, science, the environment, business.

But as alluring as this seemed, and as much as the media glorified full-time motherhood, the fact was that having found no identity of their own as human beings, having developed few interests beyond the family, having failed to become full members of society, their lives did indeed feel quite pointless to them after their children grew up (or even just once their kids were at school all day, and they were alone in their house). They simply had no idea what to do next, how to waste away the time. It didn’t have to be that way, but they simply had nothing left to live for as individuals; they could only live vicariously (and thus incompletely) through what their husbands and sons were doing in the world while they themselves stayed in the kitchen.

To me this story shows how important it is to shape your own identity, and to resist attempts by others to make you step into a ready-made role. We all know the students who step into a role their parents gave them during school – become a doctor, train to be a lawyer, go into business, study something useful like engineering. And there is nothing wrong with studying any of these things, any more than there is anything inherently wrong with being a stay-at-home mom if it makes a woman happy and if she retains her own personality, her own individually shaped passions, hobbies, interests, strivings, activities, and independence as a full member of society.

But the story of American housewives in the 1950’s suggests to me that we should always seize the chance to determine our own lives by finding our own interests, passions, and specialties, and by striving for a career suited to ourselves as individuals – not to ourselves as men, not to ourselves as women, not to ourselves as whites or blacks or whatever, but to ourselves as individual human beings with our own individual tastes and interests that can transcend gender, race, culture, religion, country, our parents’ wishes, and other categories that might make one role or another seem inevitable. Taking this path is more difficult and full of risks, and may lead to judgments from other people who feel something else is suited to you, but, in the end, it might be the only way to ensure you are satisfied with your life as an individual with your own specific hopes, dreams, and ideas.

I will be posting a second reaction to The Feminine Mystique tomorrow, and a third reaction on Tuesday.